Page 9 of I Loved You Then (Far From Home #12)

Questions, yes. An avalanche of them. Claire nodded sharply, and turned toward the stairs, her brain and body already screaming to get outside.

They moved together through the castle and then outside, Claire’s eyes darting everywhere.

Yesterday, when she’d tried to leave this stupid place, she’d taken a better look at everything—the stables with their empty stalls, the cold forge of what appeared a blacksmith’s hut, other shuttered outbuildings, and several people, some idle and some busy, every one of them and all the surroundings as convincing as a high-budget movie set. Frighteningly convincing.

As she had two days ago, Ivy guided her through a side gate and out onto the cliff path.

The wind slapped at Claire’s borrowed skirts, colder and wilder than she’d expected with the sun shining so bright. She wrapped her arms tight against her middle, frowning at the wide, restless sweep of sea below.

“All right,” she said after a moment, meaning to get right to it, “Let’s pretend I believe what you said. Why is it so quiet here?” she demanded, unable to stop herself. “I mean if this is supposed to be a real, living, breathing medieval castle? Is it an abandoned one?”

Ivy pissed her off by saying first, “Claire, it really is thirteen-o-five. I’m not sure how much you know about Scotland’s history, but this is the time of the war with England—you know, Edward the first, Longshanks, William Wallace, Robert Bruce...?”

“I’m familiar with the history,” Claire said, huffily, but was compelled to qualify, “as much as any American would be.”

Ivy, with oodles of patience it seemed, nodded.

“All right, so just since you arrived, but while you were still down with the fever, the armies left. Most of the men have ridden out,” Ivy explained.

“They’d received word of a large English force moving north.

The laird here, Ciaran Kerr, and his friend—Alaric MacKinlay—took their men to scout and harry them.

Only the house guard stayed behind... and two younger men I trust.” She gave a faint shrug.

“Honestly, it would probably be more convincing for you if the armies were still here. Hard to argue with hundreds of medieval soldiers in one place.”

Claire barked a humorless laugh. “I still can’t believe it. Actually, no—I refuse to believe it. I just haven’t figured out your motive yet, for making it up.”

“I understand.” Ivy’s smile tilted. “Claire, I still say that to myself sometimes—and it’s been nearly a month.” She went on, asking with some hesitation, “Would it help if I told you what happened to me? How I came to be here?”

Claire’s dark expression said she doubted it, but she gave a shrug, her voice still sharp with anger. “I can’t stop you.”

“Well... I’m from Indiana,” Ivy began. “I originally came to Scotland to study abroad—I was training to be a vet. Then I met this guy, David, and, well—” she grinned awkwardly and pointed at her stomach—“this happened. So I stayed on after the semester. Then David decided he wasn’t interested in either me or the baby.

My bad. I judged him wrong.” She shrugged and fisted her hands.

“Anyway, I planned to go home. My flight was booked. I thought I’d take one last easy hike—say goodbye to Scotland, you know?

I’ve gone over it a hundred times, but I still can’t pinpoint what happened, or if there were signs.

The only thing I remember is the air changing.

Like it got heavier. Denser. Then everything around me shifted—suddenly the trail, the trees, all of it.

.. none of it was familiar anymore.” She paused, and it seemed she was recalling the moment, her brow furrowed, her gaze fixed on Claire.

“That was the easy part. The hard part came after. I wandered for hours, trying to find anything recognizable. Instead, I stumbled straight into a battle. Scots against English. Arrows flying, men screaming, blood everywhere.” Her lips trembled briefly.

“I didn’t understand any of it. I thought maybe it was a reenactment, until I saw a people die.

That’s when it hit me that whatever had happened—this was real.

” Her hazel eyes dropped to the ground. “And that’s when Alaric found me—sword in hand, face bloody from fighting.

I didn’t know who he was, only that he terrified me.

I was so confused, I thought surely I was dreaming.

He looked at me like I’d dropped from the sky, which I guess, in a way, I had.

He demanded to know who I was, where I came from.

I couldn’t even answer him. I was too confused, too scared.

And from there...” She trailed off, biting her lip.

“From there, it only got stranger. At the same time, it became more real. I found myself traveling with them—the MacKinlays, that is, Alaric’s clan.

After a while, with things only becoming more confusing, I finally asked what year it was—like who asks that question?

Outside of movies, or fiction, who has to ask that question?

I passed out when they told me—it didn’t make sense, and yet, considering what I’d seen and heard, it was the only thing that did make sense. ”

“But it’s impossible,” Claire pressed, nearly whining her argument.

“You can’t just...slip through time like stepping through a doorway.

” For now, she set aside the jackass, David, and that issue.

She tried to scoff at Ivy’s narrative, but whether true or not, it was apparent Ivy believed it.

Her voice had cracked when she spoke of men dying, of blood she couldn’t dismiss as fake.

Her hands kept fidgeting as she related those memories.

“It’s impossible,” Claire repeated, clinging to what she did know even as Ivy’s recollection of the air changing had stricken Claire with a frightening foreboding, since she’d experienced the same thing.

“And yet here we are,” Ivy reasoned.

Ivy angled her toward the wind, guiding them along the cliff path but keeping them well back from the edge.

“I went through the same thought process you are. I told myself there had to be a logical explanation—that maybe I’d fallen, hit my head, and was in a coma.

That I was imagining it all. But no matter how many times I pinched myself, I stayed here.

Eventually... you stop fighting what your eyes keep showing you. ”

Claire shot her a sidelong glance, lips pressed thin. “You don’t seem unhinged by it. But I feel like I’m going to be. I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

“Honestly?” Ivy exhaled a dry laugh. “I was marching with a medieval army in those first days. Confused, terrified—but survival came first. There wasn’t time to break down, not with men and swords and danger everywhere.

Sure, it tortured me in the quiet moments, but most of the time I was just trying to get through each day without drawing attention—especially from the laird.

Alaric. He scared me half to death in the beginning. ”

“And now?” Claire prompted, made curious by the softening of Ivy’s voice when she said his name.

Ivy blushed a charming shade of pink. Claire bit back a grin.

“Now... we’ll see,” Ivy said. “But let’s just say I haven’t prayed in years, and I pray every morning and every night that he comes back safely.”

Claire’s eyes widened, the sharpness in them easing for the first time since she woke up here. “So you walked—or fell—into a historical romance novel?”

Ivy laughed outright. “I guess I did. Or maybe a medieval time-travel fantasy.”

Silence stretched between them for a moment, until Claire spoke again when a fantastic, ridiculous thought struck her. “Oh my god,” she cried. “I am literally Claire ! From Outlander! Seriously, this is...it’s...” she couldn’t even finish.

Ivy didn’t even try to contain her laughter. “Oh, wow. I guess you are.”

They walked on a bit in silence, Claire collecting her thoughts.

“Did you love him?” Claire wondered.

Ivy’s head snapped toward her. “Alaric?”

Claire shook her head and clarified, “David, the father.”

“I thought I did,” she said after a moment, her voice low.

“At one time, maybe I really did. He made me feel like I wasn’t invisible, like I mattered.

He was my first real boyfriend.” She let out a shaky breath, admitting, “But since I’ve been here.

.. I don’t think I’ve thought of him once. Not until now.”

She showed a wince to Claire, as if to say, How awful am I?

Claire gave a short laugh, able to understand that with ease, having hardly thought of her own husband. “So, you’re telling me time travel cured you of a bad boyfriend.”

Ivy snorted, the sound caught between a groan and a laugh. “God. When you put it like that....”

Claire considered other questions to ask, but before she might have voiced them, Ivy gasped, clutching her belly. A look of pure panic stole over her face.

“Oh, no. No, no, no,” Ivy moaned.

“What? What is it?”

“I—I don’t know.” Ivy pressed her palms against the curve of her stomach, eyes wide.

“It just... everything clenched for a second.” Her voice rose an octave.

“Oh God, Claire, what if it’s labor? What if it’s happening right now?

I’m not ready—I haven’t read the expectant mother books in months—I thought I’d have time—I wanted Alaric here when the time came—”

Claire’s nurse’s instincts surged before she could think. She grabbed Ivy’s arm and rubbed it gently. “Relax. Breathe. Did it feel like tightening, or was there pain, like cramps?”

“It didn’t hurt,” Ivy whispered in a small voice.

“You’re fine. You’re probably not in labor,” Claire decided. But the next few minutes would tell.

Ivy’s eyes went wide. “How can you say that? You said you don’t even have kids!”

“I don’t,” Claire admitted, “but I’m a nurse. A trauma nurse.”

The way Ivy sagged with relief, nearly crying, was almost comical. “Those are Braxton-Hicks contractions,” she said, almost certain of it. “Practice rounds. Annoying, but harmless. You’re not going into labor. Not yet.”

The look on Ivy’s face—shaky laughter and desperate gratitude—was almost enough to thaw the hard knot in Claire’s chest. Almost.

“Maybe,” Claire said, now the breathless one, “if what you say is true, maybe I was—brought here? Sent here?—for a reason.”

Ivy stared at her, her mouth falling open.

And damn her for looking as if she hoped it were true.

***

The next few days slipped by uneventfully—as much as possible given her circumstance as a whole.

Monotonous, yes, but each one managed to test and wear on Claire’s stubborn disbelief.

At first she clung to the idea that Ivy was lying—and it drove her nuts that she couldn’t imagine a reason why—or that she was simply deranged.

As the days passed, it became harder to deny what her eyes and ears kept showing her.

The clothes, the speech, soldiers in medieval helmets carrying medieval weapons, walking the battlements, the lack of even the smallest modern convenience.

.. what else was she supposed to think but what Ivy had put into her mind?

Of course, it unsettled her—more than that, obviously.

At times, she was beside herself, and became someone she didn’t know, not even in the unhappiest moments living in her husband’s shadow.

Claire wasn’t the type to cling, not to Jason even, but she found herself shadowing Ivy whenever she could, afraid to be alone.

Thankfully, Ivy didn’t seem to mind. If anything, she seemed pleased with the company, glad to have someone who understood her words without translation, even if Claire’s attitude toward Ivy swung almost hourly, shifting from animosity to wary curiosity to an anxious dependence she really hated.

Ivy explained what she had learned in her short time here at Caeravorn.

A woman named Mòrag oversaw the kitchens and the midwife was Ruth; the steward—the administer of the keep, Ivy explained—was Seoras; she advised which MacKinlay men-at-arms were good, and which were best avoided.

Ivy admitted she hadn’t been at Caeravorn long enough to know too much about the Kerr men-at-arms. Claire listened, half comforted by the order in Ivy’s explanations, by knowledge itself, and half discouraged by the realization that she was listening as though she might need to know these things herself.

At night, when the shadows pressed too close, Claire told herself it was only temporary.

Somehow she’d wake up again, back in her own bed, in her own time.

But during the day, with Ivy at her side, she started to wonder if it was wiser to stop fighting the impossible and start learning how to live with it.